Amazon could be moving into networking hardware

Move could send shockwaves across the networking industry.

Amazon wants a piece of the corporate networking hardware pie, new reports have claimed.

According to The Information, Amazon Web Services is “contemplating” entering the market for data centre network switches.

The same report states that networking switches are a huge market, especially when it comes to large enterprise customers. At the moment, the market is dominated by Cisco and Arista, and it seems as these two are lacking customisation. That’s at least what the media are saying.

These customisation options should allow corporations to manage their data centre with fewer engineers, and that in the long run means – less expenses.

There are obviously no concrete details, given that the company is just thinking about it, but a timeframe of 18 months is being thrown around. During the next year and a half we’ll know for certain if Amazon will build such a product, or abandon it altogether. Although, given its current position, the former seems more realistic.

Amazon is the world’s biggest cloud infrastructure platform, which means it could use these switches for its own data centres. Also, it can sell the hardware to other companies, as well.